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CLASSROOM THEATRE

The Visible/ Invisible Citizens

When the society goes through a social crisis and the people are denied all means of expression and their dreams are made to vanish, marginalized people are transformed into invisible citizens. Such invisible citizens can be seen everywhere; they have the same features and the same invisible ID. However, it is those invisible, marginalized people who write the real history of any nation.

Through our practical experience in the field of culture in general and the field of theatre in particular, we now strongly believe that the key to society is changing the elements of cultural understanding of marginal children and encouraging them to express their creative energies. Thus, a child’s cognitive awareness can be developed through the theatre when the latter is used as an approach tool to achieve that end.

In the past couple of years, and through cooperating with the Al-Ghad Association, we have given lots of short theatre performances (mainly story-telling accompanied by music, inside the classrooms (watch the documentary) located in the schools in the poor areas in Alexandria. This project targets the children between 9 and 14 years old. Nearly 1800 children have watched 60 of those performances, each lasting 45 minutes. Moreover, through this first phase of the project, we have seen and met many children who need to watch such theatre performances, in addition to others are themselves talented in the fields of theatre, singing and dance.

We are currently moving to the second phase of this project, which is inviting those children to attend theatre performances outside the walls of their schools; they are invited to performances located in the latter’s genuine environment: the theatre room itself